And that is what I liked about it.
the ability to gut your own software, all the fun is kind a gone out of it, with the registry and libraries.
If it stuffs then you can't ripp out a module and change it, its all or nothing.
It doesn't happen often that things really go, but when they do its devistating.
the os is to complex to find what a module does anymore.
If it screws its faster to restore an image or just reformat and hope it doesn't go nuts again.
In the early days, things didn't misbehave much but it was easy enough to just clear the issue without disturbing the os.
Had a friend get scared and turn off his computer because he had never heard the drive scan at all before.
Managed to wreck his mbr and os image.
I upgraded his os, and put his old configs back.
He lost nothing and gained a new os upgrade.
Another time a shareware program at a school I was at expired and went off and took out the os at startup.
I was able to remoove the offending lines and then uninstall the app, weell till I got permition to buy and install a full one.
Everything in windows is central which is fun till it fails which granted it doesn't often so you have more time to do mails like this and not babysitting.
However if it fails it can be solved maybe or it may be easier to restart and hope after a full reformat and program update of everything you think is the issue that it well works.
And if you are lucky it will for a time.
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On 20/04/2016 3:48 p.m., David Moore wrote: Hi guys,
I remember those good-old days well. When I went to college in the 80's,
I had the 720 KB floppy disks. I had DOS, a synthesizer, and a Pascal
interpreter on one of those floppies. I remember when Ohio State got a
few IBM AT's with a 1 meg hard drive, and one could put everything
imaginable on it. MS then thought that one would never need more than a
few meg for everything they had. Windows OS sure changed all of that for
sure. Also, computer programs were very concise then. The programmer
tried to have as few lines of code as possible so that space would be
conserved. Now, because of all the room we have on our systems,
programmers have many lines of code that is not necessary. Teachers who
said to write only one page made it much harder for me to summarize
everything in that little bit of space. I would imagine that it was
harder for programmers in the 80's to summarize everything in as few
lines of code as possible. We do have way more room than we need. Also,
videos and audio files could be made much more compressed if people did
not expect HD video quality and the best audio quality. You brought back
a lot of good memories. Jobs for the blind were plentiful in computers
in the dos days, because everything was text and command driven instead
of a five year old being able to point at an icon and click. Many more
people can use the computer, but it has made it harder for the blind to
use new computers. It seems like technology is trying to make everything
easier and easier for the sighted, but at the same time, it makes it
much more adventurous for the blind. But there is a lot of good that has
come out of this. Artificial intelligence will enable the blind to do
many tasks in the next ten years like driving a car. We have to look at
the glass half full and look toward a totally different future than we
had in the 80's. Thanks for some good memories. Take care.
-----Original Message----- From: Shaun Everiss
Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2016 8:41 PM
To: nvda@groups.io
Subject: Re: [nvda] This is the moderator speaking: Question Regarding
Eloquence for NVDA from Code Factory
To be honest you'd be surprised what I had back in the day.
While I didn't use windows 3.11 or anything, I had wordprefect 5.1
though didn't use it much as I had a keynote gold 1850 and used keysoft
1 and mastertouch 1 for my work.
I had a 80mb drive then when that died a 60 mb drive.
I was able with drivespace from dos 6.22 to compress the drive to round
110-130mb and then ran compressed.
On that drive, I had wordprefect with documents, dos 6.22, a coppy of
norton utilities 7 later upgraded to 8.
quarterdec expanded memmory manager version 8.0, several games and
interpriters to run them, at least 5mb worth of utilities some made in
house by someone I knew at the time.
And I still had space.
I knew friends that had old office 4, works version 2, several games, in
fact most of the 500mb drive they had was games, both for windows and dos.
a cd drive, and soundblaster etc.
What you must remember is that 125mb was actually quite a lot.
The biggest programs were never more than 10-20mb however, remember that
dialup stuff means that 1-5mb was rather big in those days.
Your os was on 3 disks and if you had the suplimentals 4.
My toshiba had its own utilities disk and origional os disk.
all 1.44mb ofcause wordperfect came on 6 720kb disks.
2 disk for the printer.
1 for the dictionary.
1 for the printer program.
1 for the wordperfect program itself.
1 for the graphics components
1 for the installers, utilities, graphics drivers, basic graphics files,
text driver, and fonts.
The installer also created all the network files itself, modified My
compressed 110mb drive actually had a lot on it though 95% of it was for
fun I even had x tree gold.
The thing with the modern system is that everything got bigger once
windows became its own opperating system and not a dumb dos shell.
True programs were written for it but even so.
Up to windows 98 in fact windows did still use a stripped down version
of dos, each version having less and less.
Windows me had a really stripped down version of dos that with a little
hacking you could be made to access.
From windows 2000 on windows was its own os though the nt based os we all know and love now existed it was for network users.
configurations etc.
The major advantage with the 9x systems was you could run just about
everything or anything and the system would not care.
Ofcause you didn't have the driver library for things like flash drives
and the like and usb support in fact didn't exist when win95 came out
but even so I kinda liked it.
No intercepts, and no real issue.
Later on with all the security protection etc that came with windows,
you got a lot of broken chains and issues with screenreaders running
together and uninstalling and the like.
You could do it if you knew what you were doing but it was unstable.
If you screwed up, then you could redo the chain but you would have to
reload the display and start again and then or reformat which is what
happened whenever I forgot to run things in the right order or at once
which was easy to do hotkeys and all.
With the dcm mirror system you can't do this anymore because its all
library driven.
And with uia now you definately can not cause any real issue.
That may actually be one change and only a reason that would get me to
upgrade to another os though the mirror system works just fine.
Ofcause with nvda and things that directly access the components of the
windows os all those off screen models and the like are bypassed though
you can loose some vertual modes and the stuff for some of the access
things have changed.
Programs are relying on web components for starters and thats where it
is at.
Eventually we may se an os based on the web and as long as that is
accessible it may not be that bad.
On 20/04/2016 11:41 a.m., David Moore wrote:
Hi,
With a 125 meg hard drive, how can you even have any programs or
documents on there? Do you back them up to a floppy disk?
From: Carlos
Sent: Monday, April 18, 2016 7:11 PM
To: nvda@groups.io
Subject: Re: [nvda] This is the moderator speaking: Question Regarding
Eloquence for NVDA from Code Factory
Hello Again:
A description of my PC:
*Packard Bell Legend V
*386SX 16MHz Processor
*125 Megabyte Hard Disk
*EGA Video Card
*14 Inch Monitor
*Sound Blaster I Sound Card
*101 PS/2 Keyboard/Logitech Three Button Mouse w/Rubber Ball on
Bottom
*Windows 3.11/MS DOS 6.22
*Norton Commander 5, Microsoft Office Professional
*NVDA 5.x
Long live the 90's!!!
*
On 4/18/2016 3:27 PM, Brian Vogel wrote:
Rosemarie Chavarria wrote, in regard to a friend of hers who
insisted on staying with WinXP, "I asked him why and his answer was
that it was simpler to work with."
And I can't count the times I've heard this, about way more than
Windows, and thought, "No, it's not easier to work with - it's what
you're used to." Win XP was an OS I loved and Microsoft has the
annoying habit of alternating "good" and "bad" versions of Windows.
The number of things that require manual intervention from the user in
XP is huge compared to later versions, particularly Windows 7
forward. And, when it comes down to it, even in the "ugly" versions
of Windows the similarities to their predecessors is at least as
strong as the differences, but the differences are where people are
required to learn something new.
David Moore's comments regarding those who live to be 100, or near
it, really resonate with me. My grandmother died in the 1990s and was
in her 90s at the time. When I think about what technology was at her
birth and the amount of change she and her age cohort had to go
through I am amazed. I don't know if I could be as flexible as they
were. While the pace of change has picked up, particularly in the
cyber world, the majority of changes I've lived through (I'm just
short of 54 years old) feel to me much more like refinements on very
familiar themes rather than complete divergences from what came
before. That was not true for my grandparents at all, and my parents
experienced more revolutionary changes than I have, too. I think my
only two revolutions were the introduction of the personal computer
and the ascendance of the internet.
Brian
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